Don’t believe me? Just compare the way Wall Street treated the recent travails of Knight Capital Group Inc. and its well-respected CEO Thomas Joyce to the way it watched, abetted and even enjoyed the slow, brutal demise of Bear Stearns and its CEO, Jimmy Cayne, and Lehman Brothers and its CEO, Dick Fuld.

Knight, only a few days after incurring a self-inflicted $440 million technology-induced loss, not only was able to arrange an interim financing lifeline but a permanent equity infusion from six firms: Blackstone Group LP, TD Ameritrade, Jefferies Group, Stifel Financial Corp., Stephens and Getco LLC (a direct competitor). In what was in some ways an embarrassment of riches, Knight was reported to have received more than 90 offers of assistance and its Board of Directors turned down what might have been an even more attractive last minute offer from Citadel LLC.

“Wall Street came to the aid of one of its own,” wrote the Wall Street Journal, quoting one industry participant as saying, “A world without Knight is a worse world.”

Now contrast the Knight Capital narrative with the sagas of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers at the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. That’s when JP Morgan initially offered a mere $2 per share for Bear Stearns stock that had been trading at over $70 earlier in the year. The entire financial services industry, its regulators and the US government let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt. Ask yourself, did the outcomes have anything to do with the character and the reputation of the CEOs involved: the trustworthy Joyce vs. the infamous Cayne and Fuld?

Most certainly they did.

I have served on the Board of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) for several years with Tom Joyce and I can tell you that he is a stand up guy who is admired, respected and trusted by his peers. I didn’t talk to Joyce during his week of crisis, but I respected the refreshing forthrightness with which he accepted responsibility and accountability for the trading glitch that brought Knight to its knees. “We made an error and we paid the price,” Joyce said in an August 6thinterview with CNBC. I was impressed with his ability to leverage his industry relationships to quickly arrange temporary and permanent financing for his wounded firm and the decisiveness he showed in choosing dilutive terms for the sake of survival.

And most of all, I admired the way Joyce talked throughout the crisis about moving forward, rather than about what had happened. “The actions we have taken and will take in the future will determine whether people will have a high or low opinion of me,” Joyce said.

Tom Joyce is a man of character. That’s why the financial services industry went out of its way to save Knight Capital.

Contrast Joyce with Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne…the guy who played in golf and bridge tournaments while his firm was imploding and who, a decade earlier wouldn’t back the Fed when it called on the big securities firms to bail out Long-Term Capital Management to preserve the safety and stability of the financial markets.

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The firms that rescued Knight made an obscene amount of money for their saving Knight, over 100% over that weekend.

Maybe the Knight CEO is a man hardworking well liked executive, but things went royally wrong on his watch. For how many years is this executive not going to take a bonus and not not take either free shares or options that are below the stock price before it tanked.

As shareholders one often sees no correlation between pay and performance. The stock tanks, give the executive more options at a lower price, more free shares a raise and a bonus.

his watch??? Think about it. (would you or him be able to keep track of 1 line of bad code even if the computer programmer told you what the line of code meant) and the programmer thought it was good code. 100 % of the software written for stock trading is buggy. Believe me I know 34 years i the computer field and havent found a (clean) piece of software yet

Mr. Taft, I’d like my three minutes back. I’m sure in retrospect RBC will want some of their reputation restored as well.

Whether or not Joyce’s character was “good” has nothing to do with why Knight was “saved” and LEH and BSC forsaken.

Not only do you completely disregard the timing and level of financial system distress in the comparison you disregard the specifics company of the three companies being analyzed. LEH and BSC were insolvent, and illiquid during a period of time when certain parts of the bond market were completely frozen. It’s not that their algo trading teams uploaded faulty code it lead to equity erasing mistakes. They were aggressively leveraged in a time of systemic frailty….

Et Cetera, Et Cetera, Et Cetera with the FACTS of the situation being analyzed, something that you seemed to skip in your arguments. These are the facts that investors looked at when considering whether or not to save these firms. Not whether or not the CEO had a character that they deemed “good.”

If I were a client of RBC I would severely question you and your firm’s ability to segregate the fact from the noise. Just because I like someone, and trust them, doesn’t mean they are suited to manage my money. They need to have keen analysis, something that I feel you and your firm lack.

I am certainly not an expert on these matters, but as a shareholder I am appalled at how the common man loses just about everything under Mr Joyce’s watch and he is proclaimed a hero by you and other news sources. In 45 minutes this company lost over 400 million dollars. The CEO is still in place?

A lot of what you read on the internet is area 54 stuff. Joyce ….who cares.. ya dont know him personally, ya got to trust the rhetoric. and ya got to trust someone or noone in stock investments(personally noone). But when a computer programmer screws up and 100% of them do there is no way a joyce, 0bama,the Pope could even figure out the jargon the programmer would be talking about to explain his/her code. just trust your instincts. Hope KCG is solid as they hve been and hope the institutionalized (mafia) agrees